Designers spend hours picking out the most appropriate colour schemes for their design solutions trying to find that perfect balance. I can easily lose myself in varying degrees of shades, testing to see which evokes my desired sensibilities.

Now I can immerse myself in the process even further with Colour Lovers. A site that allows you to easily create your own colour and pattern palettes, then share them with an online community. Vice versa you can also trawl through palettes that other Colour Lovers have also created.

Creating your own colour palette is incredibly easy. I created the palette below by choosing an individual shade at a time. All of the colours on the site are provided with a hex and RGB code. What’s really nifty though is with each selection I was then given varying shades of the original, allowing me to be more accurate about my choice.

Alternatively, you can choose to create a palette from an image! In my opinion this is one of the best features of this site. An image can evoke strong emotions and in a lot of circumstances this can come down to its colour scheme.

I fell in love with the hues of coral and dusty pinks in an image of balloons I found a while ago and couldn’t wait to upload it into the site’s module. Once the image was uploaded I was presented with a default colour palette and a spectrum of shades that were also used in the image.

Next, I replaced some of the default colour options in my palette with some other shades to really finesse my palette. Within about 2 minutes I had the perfect colour scheme that I feel accurately evokes the emotion and mood of the original image! All in all the whole process took about 5 minutes.

Both features are wonderful and incredibly easy to use. I still have yet to start experimenting with the pattern palette module but I aim to book some procrastinating time today to do just that. No doubt this site will be my obsession for the next month, which is actually very timely as I’m already slowly coming down from the high I received when I discovered Pinterest for the first time.

Colour, it is without a doubt still one of the most debated aspect of any design solution because every individual has their own personal preference towards one or more colours. My favourite colour is baby blue because it calms me but you would never guess that because I love to wear red which has always made me feel empowered. Essentially colour is more than just personal preference: it can target a specific emotion or mood in a person and that is one of the vital life supports of any design.

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Jessa